Aaron Giles Wednesday talks about growing up in the
Gum community.
DNJ, Mark Bell, Monday, March 11, 2013
GUM — The community could just as well be somewhere over the rainbow, but instead it’s just a few miles down the road from downtown Murfreesboro, off Manchester Pike and a little past Buchanan.
The unincorporated Gum community in southeast Rutherford County is perhaps best known around town as the place that is a reminder that “The Wizard of Oz” star Judy Garland (born Frances Ethel Gumm) or at least her ancestors, have ties to this county.
Her father, Frank Gumm, was a native of the county.
In Gum today is a lot of beautiful farmland, Tim Gordon’s old market (which is still called Gordon’s Market, though it’s now owned by Murfreesboro businessman Chris Patel) and people with memories of one of the most devastating tornadoes in recent history — one that wiped out more than 72 residences, but killed no one.
It’s also home to a man by the name of Aaron Giles, who resides in what used to be the 7000-block West Gum Road home of his father, Henry Giles, who is now deceased.
Giles, a single man now in his 50s, said he spends most of his free time sitting on his porch in a rocking chair, which he said he bought his father for his birthday before he died a few years ago.
His companions, two dogs, one of which he bought for his dad a few years after his mother passed away from cancer, were close by him this past week as he greeted a reporter and photographer from The Daily News Journal as they roamed his neighborhood.
Giles, who readily admits he’s an old country boy, wore brown coveralls — the handle of a pistol protruding from one of the big pockets in the front — as he began telling the story of his growing up days in Gum.
“One of the things that sticks out in my mind was that when you were young growing up here, you learned to respect the older people,” Giles said. “I learned respect for older people at a real young age, partly because my father used to take me to the old Porterfield store down the road here, where all the older folks would get together to play checkers, talk up a storm and drink a lot of coffee. I just listened to their stories. I loved it.”
Giles remembered his father taking him to a Holstein farm once as a young boy to see some of the “first electric milkers in this area.”
“He went in; he had milked with his hands all his life,” Giles said, laughing.
“He looked at it (the electric milker) and said, ‘I think it might work.’”
Giles also remembered installing the plumbing in his parents’ home one day with his then 16-year-old brother. Giles was just 8 at the time.
“We only had running water in the kitchen sink to begin with, and we put in the bathroom and stuff ourselves,” he recalled with a smile growing over his face. “We were in there working with a jackhammer and next thing my know my brother is telling me, ‘I gotta go little brother. Can you handle that jackhammer?’
Gordon’s Market continues to operate in the Gum community.
“Later on I found out what he was going after. It was a young woman. He left me there with the jackhammer. ‘OK, I can handle it.’”
Giles recalled roasting weenies and marshmallows with his family many nights on their Gum Road property, which he said was one of his fondest memories from childhood.
“That was the kind of simple family fun you had back then,” Giles said. “People were happy with what they had. There wasn’t that need for more and more material things all the time.”
When Giles was a child, Interstate 24 had not made its way through the Gum community, he said. It wasn’t until the early 70s that the Giles family sold part of their 50 acres of land to make way for the interstate.
Sewart Air Force base in Smyrna — which is where Giles’ father was working at the time — closed not long after, he added.
“He was in the Air Force and then went into the civil service,” Giles said.
That work took Giles and his family away from Rutherford County to North Carolina in the early ’70s, but they returned by 1978, according to Giles.
As time rolled on and the family aged, Giles said, his mother developed cancer and his father eventually had Alzheimer’s.
Giles’ mother and father had been married for 38 years when she died at 61-years-old, he said
“My father was brought up in the generation where you don’t show any emotion ever,” Giles said. “I never saw him shed a tear until she died. He couldn’t stop crying then.”
Giles’ father lived another 21 years after his mother died, Giles said. His dad outlived pretty most of the old-timers who had grown up in Gum.
“That was one of the hardest things on my father, I believe,” Giles said. “Seeing all his friends go away. He was sort of the last man standing.”
Since then, Giles has been carrying on in his father’s footsteps. He’s tried to live a simple life and be kind to people like his father always was.
And though Gum will never be the same to Giles with his mother and father gone and with the progress brought to the county by Interstate 24, he said, “There are still an awful lot of good people out here, and I’m thankful to call this home.”